The Black Knights are a CITY of HEROES villain group that premiered with the new Night Ward zone in Issue 23.

In doing the concept, I had two key goals: 1. Figure out a series of armor layers that together could cover the whole villain group, from scrubs to bosses AND

2. simultaneously make sure the assets could work on the player models. With the original Medieval set woefully out-of-date and never that historically accurate to begin with, we really wanted to use this opportunity to address those problems and give players something worthy of the era

Definitely a lot of things to accomplish in just one model, but I think we got it right.

This set is amazing, and the concept art is great! Good to know that this is going to players soon, because I always thought it looked like it was optimized for player characters, but I haven't seen any confirmation elsewhere.

I remember when the nightward arcs released there was so much talk about the new enemies. And when people found out excalibur is only for titan weapons there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Because it really is an awesome sword design.

I love how the armor works not just for the heavy knights but the lighter staff fighters, and the dark mages too.

Plus I'm quite hopeful it will mesh well with the cyborg bits to make an awesome steampunk robot.

Great post--thanks! I hadn't heard that about the sword, but it warms my heart! My hope for the armor is that it'll give people 2 things simultaneously: realistic medieval armor (from the base set) plus a big bulky look that's more fantastical. VERY curious to see how it mixes and matches too.

It's painted in Photoshop and uses no lineart. The trick there is that you need a heavy value contrast between the figure's edge and the background color (here, the figure edge is white and the bg is dark gray). So you get contrast w/out needing a holding line.